Goats, gripes, and grasping for greatness

On my way into work - and very close to work - I got to yield to a deer crossing the road. He paralleled the intersection crosswalk by about 10 feet when he cut across the four-lane, divided road. He came down the hill from a tennis court and ended up in the little wooded splot behind some townhouses. He had well-developed forks, so was either two or three years old. He was trotting with a tiny hitch, his head was almost horizontal and bobbing, and his mouth was open and dripping slightly. He was at the end of a run, the end of a fight, getting over a slight injury, or rabid. My optimism would like to vote for "end of a run" or "end of a successful fight" and that he's either returning to his girls or already got his girl.

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This very articulate gent from Panama, who speaks excellent English as well, just ended his presentation explaining that he enjoyed giving his "spiel." I wonder if he thinks it's an English word, or if he knows that American English was cobbled together from British English and anything else they could find to glue a sentence together by a bunch of day laborers, bored kids, and moms-on-budgets, mostly fresh off of the boats in New York harbor.

1890. Yiddish, shpil play, game.
1870. German, spielen to play, from Old High German spilōn; akin to Old English spilian to revel.

And in case anyone doesn't need to stay serious about things, we can talk about how the "rules" of English don't make no dang sense, nohow, even when German had nothing to do with it. ( Collapse )

Or we could just be making up the whole thing... ( Collapse )